“Clowns scare people,” the auction-goer said, stopping near me as I stood in a corner of the auction house fingering one of a pair of brightly colored glass clowns.
He was a regular, a man who with his partner bought very lovely and expensive glassware at auctions. Apparently, he wasn’t into Venetian glass clowns like the one I was holding. I wasn’t going to buy but had stopped merely to check out the maker’s label on them.
A clown as a symbol of fear and terror? No way. To me, they were just make-believe, a way to make a child or an adult laugh away any ills.
The most recognizable clown of them all – Emmett Kelly – engendered feelings of sadness and harmlessness, and shades of delight. And what would a Ringling Bros. circus or state fair be like without their clowns. Or the Red Skelton show without my favorite Freddie the Freeloader, who was oh-so funny.
As I thought about it more, I remembered that my auction-buddy Janet didn’t like clowns too much either. I recalled her turning up her nose and wrinkling her face at the sight of them at auction. I think she found them creepy.
Stephen King didn’t help much with his crazed clown in the 1990 TV miniseries “It.” The master monster-maker started a trend, reversing the so-called good-clown image.
I wondered if clown phobia was perhaps an adult rather than a child phenomenon. A 2008 study by England’s University of Sheffield – and mentioned on several websites – of 250 children reported that they found clowns to be scary. The study was done as the hospital was undergoing a redesign, and the children said they did not want clowns as part of the decor. I could find little else definitive on how many people were afraid of clowns or suffered from this phobia, and only speculation as to why.
I come across clowns in all forms at auction from time to time, indicating that they are pretty popular as collectibles or as decorative figurines. At one auction last year, someone’s collection of about 200 thumb-size Spoontiques clowns were sold. They were impressive because there were so many of them.
Recently, I was struck by a clown oil painting by an artist named Louis Spiegel, who was apparently known for his clown subjects. According to the bio on the back of the painting, he was born in London in 1901 but raised in Cincinnati, OH. In his early years, he created animated captions for silent movies. He began painting at age 10, and was an impressionist artist whose works ranged from abstracts to clown portraits. “His Emmett Kelly paintings are exciting examples of his style,” according to the bio, “which one critic called ‘Van Gogh without torture.'”
At the auction house, the auction-goer went a bit farther in his assessment of the clowns: He said that they were no longer used in hospitals as therapy for sick children. That was news to me, so I decided to check it out for myself. I Googled, and found that the practice was very much in use.
Here’s some of what I found about clowns, hospitals and more:
– The fear of clowns is called coulrophobia.
– Dr. Patch Adams, who founded the Gesundheit Institute in 1971, was credited with introducing the notion of laughter as a good dose of medicine for healing. A clown himself, he was the subject of the 1998 movie “Patch Adams” starring Robin Williams.
– The Big Apple Circus Clown Care in New York sends clowns to hospitals along the East Coast. It’s been around since 1986 and clowns visit one to five days a week.
– A British circus offers therapy sessions – dubbed “clown-seling” – for people who are afraid of clowns. Coulrophobia was the third most common phobia in Great Britain a year ago, the circus said, citing a newspaper poll. The fearful are invited to watch a clown apply makeup, dress up and then interact with the clown in the ring. The ultimate goal is to get the people to make themselves up as clowns.
– After a 2009 earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy, that left 272 dead and 28,000 homeless, a group of clowns arrived to rev up the spirits of survivors.
– Israel has turned “clown therapy” into a professional health-care discipline, even offering an undergraduate degree in it. A program called Dream Doctors has integrated clown therapists into the staffs of hospitals – moving away from viewing them as afternoon drop-bys. This year, the program held a conference for medical clowns from around the world.
– Red Skelton was also a painter who created images of himself as a clown.
